By William Davis Like Texas football, SpongeBob cartoons, and Super Trooper movies, some things just grab your attention. Such, regrettably, is the case with crypto-currencies. While we’re proud to claim near [...]

By William Davis Back in 1880s, the great Thomas Edison had business interests in more than a few electricity-related companies. In the day, his informal conglomerate included Edison Lamp Company, a [...]

By William Davis Forgotten, perhaps, in all the sturm and drang surrounding last week’s market meltdown, the great American economy continued to chug along. Companies made things. Customers bought things. Big [...]

All Point, No Power By William Davis Story goes that Jeffrey Immelt, the longtime boss at General Electric, was a particularly polished presenter. Why, just last year the world’s most successful lightbulb salesman [...]

By William Davis To Boldly Go… By definition, “frontier” capital markets drift somewhere along the far edge of the investment universe -- a veritable Kuiper belt of political instability, corruption, and [...]

By William Davis So, guess who’s responsible for this month’s outsized inflow of cash into global stock funds and ETFs? According to information from the industry’s largest discount brokerages, the answer [...]

By William Davis Story’s going ‘round Wall Street about the alleged “theft” of a billion-dollar fund, ironically enough a cybersecurity exchange-traded fund with the ticker symbol HACK. It’s a mystery, they [...]

By William Davis According to Merriam-Webster, “schadenfreude” is an unintentional pleasure that comes from seeing or hearing about another person's troubles or failures. Etymologically, the word is taken from German – [...]

By William Davis According to the Orwellian-sounding Financial Stability Board, “shadow banking” is credit inter-mediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system – lending, in other words, done by [...]

By William Davis It’s likely that you first heard about high-frequency trading way back in 2014 when Michael Lewis published “Flash Boys”. In his book, the supremely talented Mr. Lewis described how high frequency traders, [...]

By William Davis Even if you’re not one of 158 million people who use Snapchat on a daily basis, you probably know that the parent company of the disappearing photo-and-video app went public last week. [...]

By William Davis Pop Quiz: Who famously said: “If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd." Circle the correct answer. A: Benjamin Graham [...]

By William Davis Question: What do the current Prime Minister of Australia, the former governor of California, and future federal funding for UC Berkeley have in common? Hint: messages from the White House in [...]

Unless you’ve been on a seemingly routine spacewalk and your shuttle was destroyed, you’re probably aware that the Dow Jones Industrial Average just closed above 20000. Who on earth isn’t? That’s because the ageless index [...]

Other kids' games are all such a bore! They've gotta have rules and they gotta keep score! Calvinball is better by far! It's never the same! It's always bizarre! — Excerpt from the Calvinball theme song [...]

Like science, movie trivia, and hitting a curveball, investing knowledge is supposed to be cumulative. All of us, in other words, have opportunity to benefit from those who have already learned — and taught — [...]

In case it’s not on your calendar, today marks the twentieth anniversary of Alan Greenspan’s famous “irrational exuberance” speech. Legend holds that the Fed chairman, who was thought to be around 120 years old at [...]

That, as one old market watcher might have suggested, is the question. As we contemplate the condition of today’s market, “collateralized debt obligations” must surely give us pause. Among the industry’s most mysterious inventions, CDOs [...]

It was 1884 when journalist Charles Dow and his statistician buddy Edward Jones published their first stock average – what we now call the Dow Jones Transportation Average – in the Customer's Afternoon Letter – [...]

A couple of things we just learned from the Closed End Fund Association: One, there’s such a thing as the Closed End Fund Association. Two, closed-end funds have been around in the U.S. since 1893 [...]

It was a bit hard to hear over the roar last Thursday when Merrill Lynch told its 14,000 brokers they were likely out of the retirement advice business. Indeed, whether anyone outside of the Thundering [...]

Any idea what the “Greenspan Put” might be? No? Well here are a couple of hints: Greenspan refers to a rather loquacious former Fed Chief named Alan; "put" refers to contractual obligation giving its holder [...]

There’s not that many long-running relationships on Wall Street to begin with, and now there’s one less. Last week, Bill Miller, the Legg Mason manager made famous by beating the S&P 500 from 1991 to [...]

So, what do you do when you’ve made a billion dollars trading other people’s money and the regulators have barred you from trading other people’s money? Here’s an idea: Start trading other people’s ideas. Quantitative [...]

On Friday, the FTC announced it had reached a settlement with Herbalife Ltd. that will allow the “nutritional-products” company to avoid being classified as a pyramid scheme. In return, the Los Angeles-based outfit will have [...]

Fore! Welcome to the 2016 Dean Foods Tournament of Whatever’s the Opposite of Champions. In what’s hoped to be the first and last of this classless classic, the nation's largest processor of fluid milk [...]

Somewhat disappointingly, the little nugget about how the hemispheres affect which way water rotates in a toilet is a myth. Fact is, the configuration of drains is responsible for the direction of spin to a [...]

Did you know that bitcoin was launched in a paper published October 31, 2008 by some form of higher intelligence calling itself Satoshi Nakamoto? We didn’t either. The still mysterious pseudonym’s detailed workings of the [...]

Remember Yahoo! Inc.? If not, here’s a clue: The struggling company with the exclamation point in its corporate name was an Internet search engine pioneer. It’s true…you can look it up on Google. In 1994, [...]

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. If you missed it, Moody’s just agreed to a $130 million settlement with a California pension fund. The agreement resolved one of [...]

Since nothing says “risk-on” like the IPO market, it’s no surprise that current “risk-off” conditions are crushing the market’s newest companies. This hostile environment will doubtlessly have far-reaching effects on Wall Street, which has been [...]

Exponentially rising volatility in stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities has left market pundits around the world scrambling to figure out what’s going on. As analysts search for reasons for the global volatility, what seems plausible [...]